Our sad retreat from desegregation

By Gary Orfield

More than 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schooling is inherently unfair, many American school districts taking voluntary action to create or stabilize integrated schools will be forbidden to continue their efforts under a recent court decision that overturned the use of race to promote desegregation in Louisville and Seattle.

In California, now among the nation's most segregated states for both Latinos and blacks, this will mean that the rising Latino majority will be educated even more overwhelmingly in schools isolated by race, poverty and, often, language. For whites who need to be prepared to function effectively in a state that has a continuously shrinking white minority among young people, there will be fewer opportunities to learn how to cross racial and ethnic lines.

Constitutional requirements are changing not through amendments but by appointments of new justices. The doctrine that the court announced is fundamentally inconsistent with the constitutional understanding that has existed for the previous four generations. The court now says that desegregation policies that would have been rejected as inadequate in the 1970s are too much and that local school authorities may not continue many kinds of desegregation policies — even where they have evidence that the policies made their schools and communities better. The enduring legal result of the Civil War, the guarantee of "equal protection of the laws" in the 14th Amendment, was obviously intended to protect the right of African Americans to enter into the mainstream of American society. But it is now being used to block programs clearly beneficial to minority students.

Although there is overwhelming evidence that stable integration rarely happens without intentional policies, school authorities will be forced to follow policies that predictably lead to resegregation, as happened recently in San Francisco after its desegregation plan was dropped.

California and the nation are already far down the path to resegregation produced by earlier decisions of the increasingly conservative U.S. and California Supreme Courts. The latest decision could undermine opportunities for magnet schools and transfers, denying the many racially changing suburban communities any tools to produce stable integration.

The court has ignored increasingly powerful research that shows that voluntary integration plans produce substantial academic and adult-life gains not only for minority students but also for whites and that school integration plans help lower housing segregation. The same court that opened the nation's consciousness to the "inherently unequal" nature of segregation will now deepen racial separation.

School officials must, of course, obey the law. They need also to look for ways to use desegregation by poverty, geography and other still-legal nonracial policies to work against the extreme isolation that afflicts so many schools.

Scholars and universities have a special responsibility to help school districts find ways to preserve what diversity is possible under the new rules, to help make segregated schools that are now unequal in teachers, curricula and levels of competition more equal, and to do the basic research that may shape future rulings.

Orfield, a professor in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, is the co-director and co-founder of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, which was established to do research on and advocacy for multiracial civil rights issues. The project has contributed to a number of high-profile legislative cases.